


Run, boy, run!

by forsakenfemicide



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV), The Umbrella Academy (TV) RPF
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Post-Canon, Reader-Insert, Reader-Interactive, Torture, all of the siblings are 22 years old
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-11
Updated: 2019-04-14
Packaged: 2020-01-11 06:41:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 11,802
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18424986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forsakenfemicide/pseuds/forsakenfemicide
Summary: You can see glimpses of the future, sometimes moments before the fact, and sometimes further along in the timeline. It's a web of possibilities; disastrous consequences can come from the choice between coffee or tea at a little doughnut shop named Griddy's Doughnuts. Imagine your shock when you see the rubble of the apocalypse only eight days later.The difference between dying in the apocalypse and living to see another day is the fateful meeting of two wayward souls in a late-night doughnut diner. You save the oddly-named Number Five from a bullet through his head and he in turn saves you from an early end at the hands of two time-travelling assassins. This bond formed from saved lives begins a partnership in a race against time to save the world from dying; and may even foster something more.





	1. This World Wasn't Made For You

You know you shouldn’t be in Griddy’s Doughnuts in the first place. You saw all of the probable futures involving you being in here, and nearly all of them ended in disaster with quite a few ending in your death.

Perhaps it was boredom? You had lived a safe life ever since childhood; you saw each and every ending to your actions, and with just a little willpower you could bend time to your will and give yourself a favorable outcome. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; you could see brief glimpses of test answers and the slightest glimmer of things that could be, but even more than that, you saw so many people die it became hard to bear. How many other timelines existed where those people did die, and you did nothing to stop it? You dig your fingers in the sides of your head, hoping the latent pain might stop your mind from wandering down dark paths.

The woman tending the shop comes out from the back and walks to where you sat at the bar. She regards you with a sad smile just barely hiding pity. You hate that look.

“Another tea?” she offers softly, noting the sad remnants of your tea at the bottom of a small porcelain cup.

You think for a second. You don’t need another one; in fact, if this tea were to be your last, you could walk straight out of this shop and forget all the probabilities you saw in which you died. You could avoid all the trouble this shop might bring you.

In a split-second moment of weakness, you nod. “Yeah,” you breathe. “That’d be nice.”

She takes the porcelain cup from you and disappears back into the darkness of the shop. In the meantime, you continue your calculations with a borrowed pen on a fragile napkin. There is a 33% chance this Griddy’s Doughnuts experience would end in your death, and considering much of your previous chances, that is pretty good. Maybe it isn’t so bad to have just another tea…?

You glance over to the door just before it chimes a happy tune to signify another customer, this one a boy your age, 22, with dark hair, wild eyes, and a strong jawline. You curse softly under your breath and turn back to scribbling on your napkin even as this stranger sits in the seat next to you. Your chances of death just skyrocketed to 66%, give or take.

You’re inclined to leave immediately, but just as you begin packing away your napkin and taking up your math homework to keep you distracted, Agnes comes back out with a steaming cup of tea in her hand. You glance in her eyes and can’t bear to leave with that smile engraved in your mind. Reluctantly, you settle back into your seat and give her a small, muffled thanks.

Gingerly, you sip at your tea and avoid the stormy gaze of the boy next to you. He is dressed up in a spiffy over-vest and smart clothes, looking as if he was to be teaching a lecture in the next thirty minutes, but you know he can’t be over 25, he seems college-aged. You’re tempted to glance over and study him to make sure you don’t know him from anywhere, but his eyes are churning so fiercely you are afraid to meet them. He asks for a black coffee; how very mature, you note.

You glance back to your scrambled equations on the napkin and make a few adjustments based on the new possible futures. As you begin finishing up, the boy beside you takes notice.

“What are those for?” he asks, voice hard and cold but eyes curious. You stiffen reflexively.

“Um,” you mumble, struggling to come up with an excuse. “Nothing, really, just trying to keep myself distracted, I guess.”

“Hm,” he hums, dissatisfied. He turns back to take his coffee from Agnes, and you revel in the fact that you might be off the hook for now.

You wisely tuck away your calculations. You saw this boy in your visions, and all roads that stemmed from meeting him tonight ended in disaster, either for you or for a lot of people. You’d need to be careful about this.

You don’t realize him staring at the side of your face until he is talking to you. “How long have you lived here?”

You glance sidelong to him, still unable to make full eye contact. “...Why?”

He looks exasperated. “I just need to know the address of this one place, a prosthetic manufacturer,” he begins, and on seeing your vacant stare, continues. “MeriTech?”

You peer closely at him now, noting how his eyelashes frame his eyes perfectly and how his hair is so easily combed over. You snap out of the reverie for a moment to shake your head for a moment. “Sorry, I don’t keep a database of addresses in my head,” you apologize, but quickly pull your old, beaten up phone from your back pocket. “But I can help you find it.”

You begin searching up MeriTech in the GoogleMaps app on your phone, but halfway through typing it out your head starts pounding with the beginnings of a migraine. Squeezing your eyes shut, your senses are bombarded by a flurry of immediate futures; in particular, you see a bullet flying through the brain of this strange young man seated beside you. You frown deeply and pry your eyes open, searching your surroundings even as your vision swims. WHere would the gunman be coming from?

“What’s wrong?” He asks you. You shake your head, then hone in on the small red dot situated on the back of this boy’s head. Panic flutters through your stomach.

“Hey,” you choke, bringing your hands up to his arms in a flurry of fear. “You can’t sit there.”  
He gives you a strange look, and you press further, squeezing your palms across his forearms in hopes it might convey this life-or-death situation. “Please, don’t sit there anymore,” you plead.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?”

He is unconvinced, and yet you convincing him meant life or death for this stranger. Contrary to everything your mother taught you, you need this strange boy alive, you couldn’t see his brains splat against the bar when you are so close to saving him. The vision presses closer against your forehead, and you realize you are running out of time. Thinking quickly, you use all the strength you can to throw the boy out of his chair and onto the floor just as an ear-piercing shot rings out through the empty, flickering shop. The bullet goes where the stranger was a moment earlier and careens into the donuts behind the counter, glass shattering and shrapnel flying past you. You shield yourself with your arms, then stumble from your seat, adrenaline numbing the cut of glass into your forearms.

The once cheery bell chime sounds sinister as men and women in black clothing and frightening masks surge through the front door of Griddy’s Doughnuts. Your vision is swimming again, but between the flickering half-light of the dim diner and the hurt of a migraine, you see their arms cradling guns and rifles, and a few of them are pointing their weapons at the boy you were trying to help.

Confusion flutters inside of you as you cower into a small, dark corner of the diner. Is this a robbery? If so, why did they let you slip into the darkness? You feel around for your phone, but hiss out a curse once you realize you dropped your cellphone with saving your strange companion. It lies dejected on the nigh demolished bar counter.

The strange masked figures exchange a few words with the uniformed boy from before until, without warning, shots begin to ring throughout the small diner. You cower further into the darkness, hands clutched over your ears and eyes squeezed shut, afraid that opening might reveal some terrifying truth to you.

But, as the gunshots continue for an extended period, your eyes begin to slip open and you see a scene of carnage. The boy from before is zipping around the diner in a way you deem impossible, using improvised weapons from around the bar to make quick work of the mysterious fiends. For a few seconds you see him disappear, then reappear with a stab of a butter knife into the neck of the last assailant. A gust of air brushes across your face as the gunshots fade and all that is left is the heavy puffing of the uniformed boy. He stands, surrounded by destruction with nary a hair out of place. You find it oddly ironic.

He scans the diner for a second and his eyes catch on you. His brows furrow as if he is wrestling with something internally, but he finally relents and gives the slightest of nods to you. “Thanks,” he murmurs, then moves to leave out the front door.

“Wait!” You call after him, but as he turns to address you, your mind goes blank, and you forgot why you called out in the first place. After a moment of scrambled thinking, you pulled shaky words from your throat. “Who are you?”

He paused again, another wrestling match in his mind, then gave a tense, tiny smile. “Call me Five,” he murmured, then turned once more and stalked beyond the door of Griddy’s Doughnuts.

As soon as he was gone, you glanced over at the bar to see Agnes peering over the table, carefully avoiding glass fragments and gunpowder. Outside of the small diner, the night flashed blue and red as sirens arrived. Looks like you wouldn’t be out of here for a few more hours.

\---

You were questioned up into the early hours of the morning by detective after detective, all asking to get your perspective of the situation and tell your side of the story again after again. When you saw the sun begin to dip over the trees on the horizon you decided it was about time to get home; you have college classes after all, and your mother must be worried sick about you. 

You dismiss yourself from the swarming officers and bluebloods with a sudden wave of your hand, hefting your backpack over your shoulder with a soft huff. Just as you begin to exit Griddy’s Doughnuts, you remember that you left your phone on the table back in the fight. With an apologetic smile, you sidestep bagged evidence and pungent bodies covered with canvas to reach the cluttered bar. You search for the familiar phone case with narrowed eyes, but you only find shattered glass and your untouched porcelain teacup framed by cold coffee and old oolong. You wish to tear through the bar to find it, as you can’t exactly afford a replacement, but you see the sharp edges of the glass glitter in the waxing sunlight and quickly decide against it. You would need to explain this to your mother later.

You turn away from the bar and pass again through the throng of uniformed officers with a few soft shoves and murmured ‘sorries.’ You give each of the officers an apologetic smile again, knowing they must be just as exhausted as you are.

The soft morning breeze brushes across your cheeks as you step into the sunlight, bringing with it the aroma of early morning dew and gasoline. It is refreshing to finally be out of that stuffy doughnut diner, especially after witnessing such an intense scene. You smile quaintly to yourself and bundle your arms closer, beginning to cleave through the chill of dawn. Your boots start a familiar path through desolate neighborhoods to your downtrodden, sagging timber-framed house. You don’t get very far from Griddy’s Doughnuts when your head begins to pound with the beginnings of a premonition.

You pause your walking and clutch your backpack tighter against your shoulder, cringing as you try to make sense of the brief future vision. Lights of what is to come flash before your eyes, motion blurs and dialogue blending together into an imperceivable soup of precognition. Then, slashing through the murky waters comes a clear vision of two masked criminals coming up behind you and taking you to the ground with deadly efficiency. Your heart skips a beat.

You glance back and behind you. You meet a gloved fist as it slams into your right cheek and sends you careening towards the pavement. In the shadows of the surrounding buildings, you glance up towards your assailant's faces but you are met only by the cold, unforgiving stare of masks obviously meant for children. You feel a weight settle on your back.

“Sayonara, sweetheart,” says one of your two attackers, a female voice. You open your mouth to respond, but before you can, a jolting blow comes to the back of your head, and the sidewalk is drenched in a thick, inky black. Your head fogs and you lose consciousness.


	2. They're Trying to Catch You

The first thing you notice is the hard chair beneath you and the bite of rough rope as it digs into your wrists. The blackness persists for a few moments after you regain consciousness, but even as the fog begins to clear from your mind, you wake up to your own personal nightmare. It is dark in the room you are in, but through the gloom, you are able to see the faintest of details. Gaudy wall paintings hanging from peeling plaster, a television set five years too old, a small kitchenette in your peripheries. Not only that, but you are restrained by ankles and wrists to the legs and arms of a rickety wooden chair by hemp rope much too ragged to be comfortable. It must have been hours before you woke up, for behind the drawn curtains you can see a few muffled tendrils of dusk light.

You let out a soft groan as pain spikes in the back of your head, and you remember the series of events that led you to this future. You had just gotten away from police questioning in Griddy’s when two masked assailants—one man and one woman—attacked you in the surrounding neighborhoods. Their motive is unknown and what they want from you shrouded even further in darkness, but nonetheless, this cannot be good.

Your pain grunt must have alerted your two captors, for a few moments later they appeared before you in all their violent glory. One was a dark-skinned woman with a dark, neatly-cut bob, and the other a similarly put together man with a scruffy beard and a large stature. Both of them wore professional suits, and while you could easily mistake either of them for an office worker, your predicament lets you know that they work in a much darker business.

You open your mouth to speak, but when all that comes out is a soft puff of air, you wet your mouth and try again. “Who are you?” You ask softly. “Why am I here?”

“It’s of no concern to you,” answers the woman with a grim glower. “We just need you to answer a few questions for us.”

You quirk an eyebrow at her. “Why would I answer the questions of my kidnappers?” You accuse, baring your teeth. “Couldn’t you have just asked like normal people?”

“The matter is important,” the man growls. “We can’t risk you giving us false information.”

Evidently, you don’t know how nor when to stop. Before you can clamp your teeth over your tongue, another question comes bubbling from your throat. Much too late, you realize you’re babbling. “So you tie me to a chair and expect me to talk? This seems counterintuitive.”

The woman’s expression grows deeper and darker, and you see a flickering flame inside of her as if she were an untameable wildfire. “No,” she responds quietly, the way her voice lilts at the bottom making your skin crawl. “We don’t expect you to talk, we’re going to force you to talk.”

The woman motions to her companion and panic settles deep in your stomach, a yawning pit to bury all of your reasonable feelings in. In the dark, you try to make sense of the shifting shadows and shapes, but the longer your mind helpfully fills in the blanks of your punishment at the hands of these lunatics, the harder your heart pounds against your ribcage. As the man straightens his back after having been rummaging around multiple tools scattered about your feet, he turns, and you see what he cradles in his arms. Long electrical wires that look as if they once belonged to a car jump starter, now modified to be a makeshift torture device. Beneath the sudden, crawling dread, you think this to be ironic, that they believe something used to jumpstart cars can also serve to jumpstart a human’s memory.

The woman places her hand on your nose and roughly shoves your head back while her fingers remain on your jaw, forcing your mouth open. You let out a strangled cry of pain as the man wielding the jumpstarter wrangles your wily tongue out from your mouth and connects the end of the jumpstarter with a pinch. You cringe as you taste gasoline and smoke on the end of your tongue, the remnants of the device’s real purpose. 

Against your will, tears begin snaking out of your eyes. You want to be sturdy and durable like the men and women you see in the movies, but many ordinary people forget that movies do not often reflect reality and that even the most battle-hardened criminals can find tears on their eyelashes when faced with the fear of losing their lives. As if amused by this, your captors chuckle.

“So,” begins the woman with a tone that makes your skin crawl. “Now that we have a little incentive, we need to know the exact location of your little ‘friend.’”

You hesitate. What friend do they mean? You begin to try and answer them, but just as you do you feel your tongue burn with heat and electricity. Your entire body convulses as the waves of energy pass through you from the most sensitive part of your body, the words dying in your throat. When the electricity subsides and fades away into a dull ebb on the ends of your fried synapses, you let out the softest whimper, feeling pain begin to set in where the electricity had fluttered through you.

“Tell us now, or we do it again,” the man threatens. The tears leak out of your eyes in a greater quantity. The panic of feeling your nerves jolt around within you gives you the motivation to attempt to speak around the jump starter. When your assailants can’t understand you, they release your tongue from the hold of the jump starter and allow you a precious few moments to speak.

“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” you cry, flustered by your shocking. “I swear I’m not involved in whatever this is.”

“Don’t lie to us,” the woman growls, and your mouth and tongue are unceremoniously thrust forward again. Your head buzzes, and your teeth clatter as another high voltage of electricity shocks through you. “Tell us everything you know, and maybe we won’t kill you.”

When the jump starter is taken away from you again, you cringe at how much your voice shakes and how your nails rattle against the old arms of the chair. “I told you already,” you tell her, this time pleading, hoping for the torture to stop. “I don’t know anything. You’re talking to the wrong person.”

This was the wrong answer. The woman’s face shifts into potent displeasure and the man’s follows soon after, each one of them glowering down at you. After a few moments of tense silence, the woman shifts her head imperceptibly, a motion so small you barely even notice it, but when she does so, the man grins wide and bends back down to his miscellany of tools. You watch him toss aside wrenches and pliers and other such frightening medieval devices before he finally finds the instrument he was searching for and returns to your face brandishing a new weapon. The waning moon glimmers in the reflection of a sharp knife, glistening dangerously mere inches from your face. A gasp is pulled from your throat, and fear clenches your stomach again.

“Here’s the deal,” the woman begins, moving your right arm so that your veins are facing upwards towards the ceiling. “For every answer that doesn’t satisfy us, we put another notch on your arm.”

To demonstrate her point, the man presses the blade down close to your arm close to your wrist and slices it. You let out a muffled scream, stifled by the clench of your teeth, and squeeze your eyes shut. You cringe at the feeling of warm, sticky blood beginning to roll down the sides of your arm and drip down onto the gaudy carpet.

“You’ve only got about five wrong answers before we slit your throat,” rules the woman. “Better get honest before my partner gives you something to really scream about.”

“Please, please, I have people I have to take care of,” you plead with her, out of answers and desperately searching for something to make them cease in their slapdash path of destruction. “I have people who would know I’m gone. You don’t want murder on your heads.”

They chuckle darkly, and you hate yourself for the words that came out of your mouth in a fit of panic. Within a few moments, the woman reveals what you dreaded all along. “We’re already acquainted with murder,” she growls to you. “And we don’t care about you or our family. We care about our target.”

Another slice to your right arm and another sob of pain. By now your cheeks are stained with your tears, and your heart is pounding wildly at your ribcage. You shout out the next thing on your mind, howling out a question to numb the pain eating away at your wrist. “Who is your target?”

The man tests his knife at the crux of where your bicep meets your forearm, and you become potently aware of the drip-drop of rivulets of your own blood hitting the carpet. Leering above you, the woman gives you the pivotal piece of information.

“Number Five, one of the best temporal agents of his time,” she says. “We know you know him.”

Your eyes go wide as the name given sparks the solicitous memories of that tall, put-together man who sat beside you in Griddy’s and shown an inordinate amount of interest in your calculations. Even then, you don’t know him. He only gave you his name, a rather strange one at that, because you were cowering in the shadowy corners of Griddy’s while watching him annihilate the unknown assassins who surged in. “No, I don’t, I really don’t know him,” you sob, choking on your own tears. You are rewarded with another swipe to your arm, bringing the total of deep lacerations across your forearm to a whopping three. One more and they would be forced to slice your neck instead.

“Time’s ticking,” murmured the man, placing his knife just below your shoulder. “Stop telling lies, and maybe we’ll have a use for you.”

“Please, he only sat next to me back at Griddy’s Doughnuts, I only got his name,” you plead, your mind racing. Your thoughts are scrambled further when the knife slices through your skin again, the sound of muscles tearing and skin breaking echoing in the empty chamber of your mind. The memories of Griddy’s Doughnuts are hazy and jumbled, addled further by the blood loss and electricity, but you know something happened in that sleep-hazed bar that could be the key to your escape. You just need to think.

The knife comes closer to your throat, and you gulp, shuddering at the cold, blood-stained metal resting close to your jugular. Think, you tell yourself, think, goddamnit!

Then, as if implanted in your mind by some mysterious celestial force, the thought descends upon you. Perhaps Five was the one who took your phone…?

“Wait, wait,” you choke out, feeling the knife scrape across your throat with the shuddering of your vocal cords. “He might have my phone on him. Maybe you could track him.”

You glance up through your tear-stained lashes to gauge the reaction of your assailants.

Bingo. The woman looks to the man, nods, and suddenly the knife is away from your throat. You slump forward in your chair, chest heaving and shoulders going up and down as you sob from the relief that floods through your body. Are you finally free?

“Don’t think you’ll be let off so easily,” begins the woman, and you glance up at her, the relief stilling in your body like ice crystallizing in your veins. “We need you to help us track it.”

The dark shadows across their faces only seem to grow more sinister the longer that you look at them. Another sob passes through your body, the relief you felt moments before a fading memory lost to the clutches of time. Now you despaired, for the more time you spent with these strange assailants, the more you felt they were mere moments from killing you. Steps echoed around you as they cut the rope from your hand and hefted you into a standing position. Perhaps it would have been easier for them to have killed you in that chair rather than take you from location to location with only a feeble task to keep you afloat.

The blood ran down your arm as they dragged you away from the chair and out the door of the motel room, armed to the teeth and ready to kill a man you had only known for an hour.

\---

The ride to the empty department store was a silent one filled with guilt. Although you had many different things to occupy your mind with--mainly the very deep and still bleeding wounds on your arms or the bruising of your face and head--you found your mind wandering to the fate of the man you had thrown under the bus to save yourself.

Many of the timelines you can see foretell his death; maybe a bullet nicks his aortic artery in one timeline, or a shelving area crushes him to death in another. Sometimes the gruesome details become too much to bear in the backseat of your kidnapper’s car so you close your eyes and will them away, but no matter what, the future always catches up to you, and you are forced to endure it all over again.

The guilt is a hard feeling to comprehend. In almost every timeline you perused, this stranger, going by the name of Five, dies in a horrible and macabre fashion, and all you can think while seeing these potential timelines is that you were the inherent cause of his death. The self-reproach of possible crimes crawls up into your heart and makes its nest there with every bump and jostle of the car’s undercarriage. The shame and want for something that isn’t gnaws away at your very being, and by the time you reach the empty department store where your phone was tracked to, you can’t be sure there is any heart left to eat.

When the rusty, beat-up gas-guzzler shutters to a stop in a dark foreboding parking lot, your heart flutters in your chest. Freedom is so close to you, just a few centimeters of glass between you and returning to your mother without ever having to deal with this again. You press your nose up against the glass windows in the backseat of the car, wallowing in pools of your own blood in despair. Your breath hitches as your two assailants open their car doors from up front and slam them shut.

Then, they begin walking away. You let out a scream of despair as the two people responsible for all of your pain and heartache start stepping away from their problems without so much as a turn back to regard you. You slam your bound hands against the cold glass of the window in a futile attempt to grab their attention, but they are oblivious to you. You watch their backs ripple with muscle as the man and woman put on two children’s masks, the very same ones you saw when you were first captured.

The tears roll back to your eyes in one fluid motion as your heart drops, the relief and excitement extinguished just as soon as it had sparked to life. There are a few more frantic taps to the glass of the door before you crumpled up against it, all the fight having left your body. Instead of a bitter resistance or chilly stubbornness, all you feel is the anguish of a life lost to the endless stream of time. The child locks on the doors were apparently too much for you to handle.

You sob for a few moments, lamenting and mourning, before the tears clear away and you receive a moment of sudden clarity. The visions return to your mind’s eye, and you slip your eyes closed to focus as images pass across your gaze. You can see a knife, the smash of glass and fragmenting of a window, cut tendrils of rope slipping from your wrists. A knife, you repeat to yourself. There must be a knife somewhere in this car, but where?

You shake away your errant thoughts and sift back into your visions, your brows furrowing and your lip curling as your serene focus shifts into prickling pain spreading across your forehead. Slowly, your consciousness slips around the future scene of the car, recounting the actions taken in that timeline and attempting to work through a solution. With no small amount of pain, your consciousness desperately searches for the location of the knife. It runs across the old leather seats up front, the hand-stained steering wheel, then finally the glove box. Your mind presses further into the future vision, and you finally see the glint of a sharp dagger.

Emboldened by the success of your barely honed superpower, you scramble up to the front of the car—banging your knee and elbow into the headrest in the process—and you manage to pull the glovebox open even despite the rope tied around your wrists. Victory surged through you as your fingers clumsily clutch around the firm, the steady hilt of the large dagger amongst papers and napkins, just as your vision predicted.

You bite your lip and struggle to orient the dagger against the tight bindings across your wrists. In your frenzied movements you accidentally slice down across your arm, and though you muffle your pain in your lip, you cringe at the feeling of more hot blood seeping down your forearm and mix with the rest. Carefully now, you wiggle the blade in between your wrists and flick up. The rope lets out a tearing sound and then falls away in ribbons of hemp, relieving the pressure on your wrists. A smile shimmers across your face as you relish in the feeling of finally being free from your bindings.

Now there is other business to attend to. Finally up in the front seat, you click the lock off the door and stumble out into the deep, chilly night.

The breeze wisps across your face as you fall away from your machine prison, a fallen angel finally reaching earth. You smile in the wake of your escape, gulping in fresh, untainted air as if it is the last time you will experience. There is no trace of blood or hatred or squalor in the wind, and you rejoice in the fact that you are finally free from the deepest darkest depths of humanity, although the physical scars may never fade. Perhaps the cuts on your wrist, just beginning to clot, will serve to be your reminder of all you were forced to endure. Maybe, in looking back on this, you might find solace in the fact you have just survived something you were never meant to survive.

Slowly, you rise from the asphalt, but you don’t get far before your head pulses and pounds. There is a stentorian beat hammering away at your brain, and with every thrum against your skull more black tendrils crawl up the sides of your vision. Your knees wobble beneath you, and you crash back onto the asphalt.

“No,” you murmur to yourself. “No, no, no, please, no!” With every denial after the first, you grow more and more frantic, pleading your body to stave off the darkness for a little while longer.

A staccato counter-rhythm joins your headspace. It takes you a few moments to realize that the new beats are gunshots. With every ear-splitting shot, the only black darkness crawls further up into the corners of your eyes. You get desperate—you plead out into the deep gloom, begging some higher force to drag you from the murky waters you are being dragged into. However, no matter how many homilies or hymns you sing under your breath, your grip on consciousness grows weaker and weaker until, eventually, you can’t feel the asphalt anymore.

You float in the endlessness of space, an identity unknown by the vast emptiness of the world around you. The breeze no longer licks at your cheeks, and the gunshots fade away into silence. Everything goes black.


	3. Running is a Victory

When you return to the world of the living, it is quiet and soft, the gentle flicker of a flame as it rises from the cinders. Your consciousness is as fragile as a glass ornament, and your attention hovers on the edge of aware and comatose as if one shift in balance meant the end for you as a person.

It takes a few moments before the balance shifts, and you realize that you are alive. You can feel the soft mattress of a bed beneath you, and the ache in your bones you once lamented so heartily before. During your torture, you had cursed the cuts across your arm, but now that you have experienced the real fragility of human life you are thankful for any sensation that keeps you aware of that fact that you are still living.

You turn your head from one side to the other. The room you are staying in is incredibly small and furnished only with a small bed and a drab dresser close by. It is made almost entirely of wood with the exception of a single window above the bed overlooking the street outside. However, perhaps the most exciting addition to the room is the familiar boy sitting in a chair at your bedside.

“You…” you murmur, glancing at the boy; there are bags beneath his calculating eyes and his thumbs are raw from rubbing them together all night. “You’re the boy from Griddy’s.” You conclude.

His eyes travel up from where he hangs his head. You try again, this time with the ‘name’ he gave you back at Griddy’s. “...Five?”

He smiles a broad smile, and you swear your heart skips a beat. “Bingo,” he relents, although his voice is strangely rough compared to when you last heard him. “However, I never did get your name.”

You are flustered as you are shocked from once again appraising his face like a piece of meat at the farmer’s market. You avoid glancing at his face in fear of seeing that mind-numbing smile and forgetting your own name in the process. You say your name into the white sheets you are covered by, then reach out to take his hand in yours and shake, but you pause as pain shoots through. You cringe and think better of the next course of action, instead awkwardly retracting your hand back to young at your side.

The events of the night before come wearing back into your memory, wildfire passing across your synapses. You remember the cut of ropes as they bit into your skin, the warm scarlet blood pulsing down your forearms, the press of cold metal against your shuddering throat. For a moment the fear returns and your stomach lurches again, but you cannot figure out why; the danger is gone, the woman and man who tortured you for hours are nowhere to be seen, and yet your heart pounds and your hands tremble. You’re stronger than this, you tell yourself, you have to be.

A feeling of a hand gently touching your arm tears you away from the dark path you were careening down. “Is everything alright?” Asks Five, much too wise for his years.

You turn to stare into his eyes, blue and searching, and you fall into the bare honesty he has laid before you. “No,” you admit quietly, but you don’t elaborate. Even as tears begin slipping from your eyes, you move forward with another question, rubbing at your eyes with the back of your forearm. “Where am I?”

He pauses. “The Umbrella Academy.”

“What?” You exclaim, jolting in the sheets. “I’m in The Umbrella Academy?”

Five furrows his brows and frowns, an expression you are familiar with. “...Yes?”

Your heart jolts again, and your hands clutch into the sheets desperately as if they are keeping you tethered to reality. You had promised yourself ever since you were a child that would never step foot in this building, that you would never be trained into crime-fighting submission simply because you were one of the 43 children born to random women on October 1st, 1997. Yet here you are, breaking the only promise you’ve ever made to yourself just because you were in the wrong place in the wrong time. This house was a house of despair and hatred, and no matter the proud smiles you saw the children gave when they had successfully answered a call to crime, you knew they suffered in silence within these walls.

“I need to get out of here,” you blabber, scrambling about your bedsheets and tangling them up in a desperate attempt to get them off. You free your torso from the bed, but you are promptly sat back down by Five’s firm hand on your shoulder. Five pins you back into the bed by your shoulder, a grim look on his face.

“Sit,” he orders you. “You’re injured, you dumbass.”

You stare at him for a moment longer, electricity crackling between your eyes and his, before glancing away and settling back into the bed with a soft huff. His hand leaves your shoulder, and you are left to think on what had occurred to get you into this situation.

You glance back over. Five is staring at you from where he sits. “Did you save me?” You ask as if asking him about some well-kept secret.

He faces some introspection, and then he nods at you, a motion that is almost imperceptible with how much your vision swims.

“Why?”

His brows raise at this question, and he inhales quickly, filling the space with the turn the cogs in his head. You watch him formulate an answer for what seems like forever, then finally he breathlessly opens his mouth and responds to you.

“I’m repaying the favor,” he tells you. “You saved me in Griddy’s, so I saved you in the parking lot of the department store.”

His answer sparks another set of questions inside you, but before you can ask, he asks first. “What happened to you?”

You bite your lip as you recount the hours of torment you endured and the subsequent actions leading to your escape.

“The police questioned me after you left Griddy’s, but when I left, I got jumped in an alleyway by a woman and man in suits and children’s masks,” you explain, placing your cold hands across your temple in hopes that the chill might quell the heat pounding in your head. “Then they tortured me for hours. They thought I knew you. I thought they were going to kill me so I told them you might have taken my phone, and so they tracked you down. You can guess what happened from there.”

Five is strangely silent, biting his lip and looking at the floor with his impeccable hair hanging over his face. This sight jogs your memory; does he still have your phone?

“Did you… Do something with my phone?”

Five looks up finally, an invisible struggle shimmering in his eyes. “Yes, I stole it and used it to find the department store. I had to throw it away, I knew they would track me.”

“It’s okay, It doesn’t really ma—“

“No, it’s not okay,” Five interrupts, his voice raised. You stop dead in your tracks, wide-eyed at his low intensity.

“You, a normal person, got tortured because of me, and that isn’t right. Not when you saved my life just last night. That isn’t okay, and I’m sorry.”

“It’s ok—,” you pause, and realize you would just be inciting him even more. You’re under the impression he doesn’t apologize often and that this moment is a special one, so you decide to use language more appropriate for him. “No, I forgive you.”

He stared at you for a moment more before smiling a tiny smile and dipping his head. “Thank you,” he murmurs, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees.

“Then,” you begin, mind racing. “Who were they? The people who kidnapped me?”

“They work for my former employers,” he answers, without skipping a beat. “And they want me dead.”

That is a lot to drop on someone with very little knowledge of the situation, but then you suppose the gunshots in the department store parking lot made perfect sense. Nonetheless, curiosity gets the best of you.

“Why would they want you dead?”

Five laughs, a sarcastic little chuckle you think fits well with his personality. “That’s a long story.”

You sigh and motion down your arm which is now covered in bandages and ointment, a pointed aspect in your eyes. “Obviously I’ve got time.”

He gives that look again, the look where you can see the sparkle in his eyes and know that means he is thinking, and you rejoice when you see the sparkle leave and know he has made up his mind. “Fine,” he relents. “I suppose you deserve to know.”

“If you’ve heard of the Umbrella Academy, then you also know that I am a time traveler. A long time ago I ran away from home and into the far, far future in an impulsive decision. The problem with the future is that there was nothing there.”

“Nothing? At all?” You ask, spellbound.

“Nothing at all,” he echoes. “There’s nothing in the future because in eight days, on April 1st, 2019, something causes the apocalypse.”

You furrow your brows, struck through the heart. You wish to debate him on the mere idea, on the concept that everything around you would be turned to dust in only six days. By what? By who? How? The questions race through your mind, but as you open your mouth to vocalize them, a flash of light streaks across your vision. You peer into the premonition with a headache pulsing behind your eyes, and you see a young, scared boy in a strange school uniform picking among debris and rubble. In an instant, you know Five is right.

“I stayed in that hellhole for nearly fifty years, and then at some point, I got a business offer from a society of time travelers tasked with preserving the time continuum,” Five explains but he spits as if the words he is speaking are poison on his tongue. “I accepted their offer to carry out temporal assassinations, but really I was biding my time until I could figure out the equations to come back and save the world.”

You pause, confused at the multiple discrepancies in his account. “If you spent nearly fifty years in the apocalypse, why do you look like you’re twenty years old?”

Five waves his hand dismissively, miffed by his own shortcomings. “An oversight in my calculations.”

“Then...Those people want to kill you for going rogue?”

“Not sure it was too obvious with all the guns they were firing at me, but yes,” Five responds, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

“And what causes the apocalypse?” You murmur after a moment or so of thinking.

“That’s my problem,” Five scoffs. “I have no idea what causes it. All I have is the date it happens, and a few other contextual clues, but nothing else besides that.”

“The how are we going to save the world?”

“I’m trying to figure it out but asking me won’t help,” Five responds with a bite to his words and a dark quality to his gaze. “And, ‘we’? I don’t remember this becoming a team effort.”

You quirk a brow at his attitude. There is a dismissive tone to his voice as if he is devaluing you personally, and you feel a surge of anger crawl up your throat.

“You made this a team effort when you saved me and told me about the apocalypse in the first place,” you bite back, curling your lip. “What are you going to do? A single god complex can’t save the earth from an apocalyptic event. Acting like you’re invincible is a death sentence.”

There is a spark ignited in Five’s eyes, and it roars into a wildfire within his heated gaze. “What help do you think you’re going to be? You couldn’t save yourself from two petty headhunters, and now you think you can save everyone else from the end of the world. You say I have a damn god complex when you haven’t even looked in the mirror.”

“At least I can accept help from other people!” You shout back, mind racing. “At least I know when to stop and realize I can’t do everything on my own. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you’d regressed in age rather than matured!”

This tiny, inconsequential insult seems to be the straw to break the camel’s back. You see something crack inside Five’s gaze and the fire within turns cold. He is suddenly very calm, but you can see the anger still coursing through him by the twitch in the corner of his lips and the strain on his downturned eyebrows.

“If you know when to accept help,” Five hisses out. “Then accept help from someone else in this damn family.”

Five stands from his chair abruptly and stalks to the door on the opposite side of the small room. He doesn’t chance a look over his shoulder before he surges past the threshold of the door and slams it shut, leaving you shocked into silence in the wake of his sudden rage.

The volatility of his actions leaves you with a miscellany of emotions pounding through you; rage, worry, despondency, and somewhere deep inside you, the tiniest seed of a thought. A thought implanted in your mind that tells you to save the world from the apocalypse. Your mother didn’t live the horrid life she did to die in a wholly preventable event.

You lay back into the bed with a huff, a new surge of confidence implanted in your body. You need to rest, but tomorrow you will change Five’s mind. That is a promise.


	4. Beauty Lays Behind the Hills

By the next morning, you feel your eyes roll back into your head from boredom. Five expects you stay in this tiny, unremarkable room for 24 hours a day until you’re ready to go home, and yet he makes no noticeable effort to entertain you for the duration. You don’t want him to coddle you, but sometimes you long to see someone else’s face besides Grace as she comes in every five hours to change the dressing on your wounds.

Lying in your bed, rumpled and clumped from a night of sleeping on it, you glance up at the aforementioned woman. Her deft fingers work across the expanse of your forearm, touching the vulnerable veins and arteries there and brushing across the deep lacerations leftover from your torture. Pain blossoms in the wake of her touch, but you don’t cringe, your mind having been occupied elsewhere. Grace turns away to retrieve something from her medical bag at your bedside. You take this chance to ask her a question.

“Miss Grace?” You murmur softly, deferring to chivalry.

“Yes?” Grace responds, a slight smile quirking the corners of her lips as she resurfaces from her canvas bag clutching a new roll of bandages.

“I don’t have to stay in here all day, right?”

Grace’s expression morphs into a frown and her eyebrows furrow. “No, of course not. You’re able to walk, aren’t you?”

You nod in swift response, shrugging your shoulders. You cringe as her fingertips go back to your arm, beginning to gently rewrap your wounds. “Of course I can, I just…”

Grace ceases her movements and stares you in the eye. You see the vibrant blue of the deeps glimmer in her gaze. “Who made you think you can’t leave this room?”

“Five did,” you blurt out before you can bite your tongue. You hesitate before continuing. “He just made it seem like… Like I’m not welcome anywhere in this house.”

“Oh, Five,” Grace scoffs, disappoint leaking into her tone. “He can be chilly sometimes. He’s just trying to adjust to his time back in the present. Don’t pay any mind to him.”

Silence falls between the two of you as Grace returns to rewrapping your arm in fresh bandages. She hears the doubt hang in the empty space as a result of your racing mind and she pauses her movements again to give you a sympathetic smile.

“You can go anywhere you want,” Grace reassures you. “Technically, we don’t have to keep you here.”

This perks your ears. You lean up a fraction from the bed. “You mean I could have gone to the doctor or something?”

Grace laughs a little, making one final loop around your arm with the bandages. “No, there would be questions I’m not sure Five would be ready to answer to,” Grace explains with a cheery smile. “But you certainly don’t have to stay here against your will. You could go back to your home and recover on your own.”

You lean back into your bedding with a thoughtful frown, rolling her words over in your mind like a river might smooth stone on its banks. As you do so, Grace ties down your bandages with steristrips and leans away from your wounds with a satisfied glow in her eyes.

“Well, your bandages are finished,” Grace affirms as she packs away gauze, bandages, and rubbing alcohol into her durable black canvas bag. She slips it over her shoulder and steps away from your bedside with a sense of finality, offering you a smile that eases your worries and calms your nerves. “If you need anything, don’t be afraid to ask.”

Grace gives one last cursory glance about the tiny room, your prison, as if searching for something out of place, then turns and leaves through the tall chestnut door on the opposite side of the room. You follow her out with your eyes and flinch when the sound of the door closing sounds much too loud. You are alone now, your only company being the soulless dressers and old violins hung on the walls around you.

Grace is right. You don’t have to stay here at The Umbrella Academy. You aren’t that injured, and realistically, you could have left upon waking up last night, but Five pushed you back so firmly into the bed he could have convinced you that you had broken your legs. The mere memory makes your heart tremble.

Yet even despite agreeing with Grace, you make no move to leave the bed and gather your belongings. Five’s conversation with you from last night reverberates in your mind; the world is ending in seven days, and all you can think about is escaping this hellhole. What would you return to? A shoddy home that won’t be standing in seven days? It is now that you make up your mind. It is a fundamental human want to secure a future for yourself, your descendants, and those around you, and leaving Five to fix the world on his own would intrinsically oppose fundamental human interests. It doesn’t matter that he says he needs no help for you know he does, and you are determined to give him help no matter what. Surely your mother can wait to see you home if she knows of the life-or-death battle you will soon be waging. 

Your mind made up, you fling the white bedsheets from your body and leap from the bed, and out the door of the room, you have been trapped in.

——

The Umbrella Academy itself is a remarkably large building. You had seen it being broadcasted on the television as a young child once or twice, but the limited scale of the screen could never truly capture the egregious grandiosity of the location itself. Winding hallways, long staircases with perfect hardwood banisters, you are under the impression this mansion would be the ideal place to play Hide-and-Seek.

Of course, this maze-like layout didn’t help when you were merely trying to find the general area of the entire place. After nearly fifteen minutes of entering rooms you shouldn’t be in and finding hallways that lead to dead ends, you descend down a massive staircase leading into an open area with pristine marble floors, and you hang a sharp left.

You pause in the large archway, peering into another large room, this time occupied by a few people you have never seen before. On one end of the room, you see a wide couch with gaudy, extravagant decoration surrounding it, including a large antler mount taking up an entire wall. On the other end of the room, somewhat separated from the seating area, you see a small kitchenette with a multitude of stools lining it and two people occupying them. One is a massive, heavily built blonde man, the other is a thin, curly-haired, attractive woman, and both are hunched over a table while Grace works at the counter-laid sink. You see a computer between the two strangers and they stare at it with thinly veiled suspicion on their faces.

You clear your throat and lightly rap on the wooden archway with your knuckles. They glance up at you with critical eyes. “Uh, hello…?”

You see the hulking blonde rise from his chair with a start, but he is quickly soothed by the curly-haired woman at his side. Before she can say anything, Grace turns around and offers you a kind smile.

“Oh, hello!” Grace calls out to you. “Luther, Allison, this was the person I mentioned to you, the one that Five saved.”

You quickly introduce yourself to the two of them and step further into the kitchenette, teetering on your legs as you do. You point first to the blonde, “Luther,” you murmur, then you move your finger to the curly-haired woman. “And Allison, right?”

They nod, and you smile, albeit nervously. “Um, nice to meet you then.”

Although awkward, you slowly move towards the table and chairs, as if approaching a wild animal, and you settle down in one of the plush, cushioned stools set up there. Grace told you that you would be welcome wherever you went in the house, her comforting words cannot shake the feeling surging in your chest, the sense that you don’t belong here, that you have just thrown yourself to the wolves. Although Allison acts polite and glances down to their shared computer again, Luther doesn’t hide his suspicious stare. You stare back at him and attempt a soft smile, but he huffs and glances back down to the computer. At a loss, you glance down and fiddle with your thumbs.

The scent of fresh eggs wafts over to you, and you glance up, noticing now that Grace is cooking something at the stove. You smile, about to say something, but she turns and cuts you off with a smile. “Would you like some eggs for breakfast?”

“Oh, sure,” you murmur in response, returning a good-natured smile. 

Grace returns to cooking the eggs and the sound of them sizzling on the frying pan fills the relative silence of the room. If you weren’t so nervous, you might say this feels nostalgic, as if you were only six years old and your mother was making sunny-side-up eggs and sausage for breakfast. Those were simpler times, but now that you are older, you are more aware of yourself, too self-conscious to fully sink into the comforting, age-old scent wafting through the kitchen. You twiddle your thumbs against the table to distract yourself, but even that grows nervewracking.

The pressure is too much to take, and you crack beneath its weight. With a soft sigh lamenting your weakness, you speak up, offering a stammering question to Luther and Allison across from you. “You guys are all together again… What’s the special occasion?”

Allison looks up at you with furrowed brows. “What?”

You stumble, glancing away from her burning gaze. “It’s just that I thought The Umbrella Academy disbanded a long time ago and you guys all went your separate ways,” you explain with nary a breath in between. “What happened?”

Allison rubs down her face with a hand, and you think she must look five years older even though you know she is the same age as you. “Nothing, just family bus—”

“Our dad died,” Luther interrupted, and you saw fire spark in his eyes. “What, you didn’t see the news?”

Your eyes go wide, and you nearly fall from your chair. You are suddenly under the impression you are defending yourself from a sphynx ready to devour anyone who cannot answer a simple riddle. “N-No, if I knew I wouldn’t have brought it up!” you yelp, raising your palms between yourself and Luther. “We haven’t had cable for years now.”

“Well, now you know,” Luther growls, venom dripping from his words. “But, if it’s alright with you, we’d like to keep our family matters to ourselves.”

Allison slaps Luther on the arm, and he recoils in shock. “Calm down,” she scolds him. “She was just curious.”

Luther rolls his eyes and Allison gives you a pointed, apologetic look, but nonetheless, the two of them return to the intriguing business on their computer. Tension hangs between you and them thicker now, and now you are much too apprehensive to cut through it. After a few seconds with no noticeable improvement to the swiftly waning mood of the room, you are tempted to leave without a word, and you rise to do so, but you pause when you hear Luther speak up again, the suspicion gone from his voice.

“Mom?”

Grace turns back to him and offers a smile, although she attentively flips an egg over and another sizzle fills the room.

Luther swallows. You settle back in your chair. “We need to ask you a few questions about the night dad died. Do you remember anything.”

Grace gets a strange look on her face, and her eyes flicker with an unseen emotion before she answers. “Of course. Sunset, 7:33 PM, moon was waxing crescent, dinner was cornish hen, wild rice, and carrots.”

Evidently, this answer isn’t good enough. You see a brief vision, one of Grace with her eyes wide open and unseeing, and her body very still as if she were a statue. A headache surges through your mind, and you massage your temples with your fingertips.

“No,” Luther says, a bit too loudly. “No, uh, later that night. In his bedroom. Did you see him?”

Grace stares at him, and a moment later laughs a soft trill. She smiles widely and brushes her hair from her face. “I don’t recall.”

Without a further thought on the matter, Grace seems to set away the idea into the deeper recesses of her mind and returns to attending to her eggs, humming a soft childhood tune as she does so. You smile fondly at Grace’s back, seeing her do this reminding you of your own mother when she was younger. The smell of cooking eggs wafts back towards you, and you inhale the aroma with a pleasant sigh.

Nonetheless, Luther and Allison are persistent. Allison speaks up this time with a query of her own. “Were you ever… Angry with dad?”

Grace doesn’t respond for a few moments, and in this silence, you think the mere notion that Grace could have ever killed Sir Reginald Hargreeves to be ridiculous. As the quiet stretches on, you believe Allison realizes this too.

“Your father was a good man, a kind man,” Grace answers quietly, turning. “He was very good to me.”

Allison presses further. “Yes, but after we all left, it must have been very difficult.”

“There were days,” Grace laughs softly, memories passing through her eyes. “You kids kept me very busy and then…”

Grace pauses, her smile faltering. You think she might continue, but something stops her, and she stares blankly ahead, discontent on her face. Luther gets impatient, you can tell by the incessant tapping of his foot.

“What?” Luther demands.

Grace smiles wordlessly.

“Mom, what were you going to say?” Allison chimes in.

Grace turns to you instead. “I didn’t know how many eggs you wanted, so I made two, just in case you’re extra hungry,” she cheers, then smiles widely and returns to scraping the eggs from the pan.

Luther and Allison turn to stare at you, and you stare back, a frown on your face and an apologetic glint in your eyes. You avoid their gaze for a few moments in favor of thanking Grace. “Thank you, I really appreciate it.”

Luther and Allison shift and return to glaring at their computer, but you can feel their judgment radiating off of them. You cradle your head in your hands, your heart pounding against your chest as the tension continues mounting.

The table in front of you is washed in a bright, shocking white, and in the emptiness of the vision, you see something hurtling at your head. Your heart jolting in your chest, you whip around before the future vision can finish and you flick your hand out. True to the glimpse into the future, something hard and solid connects with your hand, and you wrap your fingers around it, having intercepted its trajectory for your head.

You sigh softly and glance down to inspect the object—a tennis ball—and then you glance up in search of the perpetrator. You meet eyes with Five, who stands ominously in the archway you entered from.

“I knew it,” Five states.

You tip your head to the side. “You...Knew what?” you wondered, fondling the tennis ball in your hand. “Why did you throw this at me?”

Five surges forward, and you see the familiar fire in his eyes, but for some reason, you aren’t afraid of the licking flames. “I knew you had powers,” he affirms, then sits beside you at the table.

Your eyebrows shoot upwards, and even though you know you’ve been caught, you attempt to feign ignorance. “What do you mean powers? I-I’m confused…”

“Don’t play dumb,” Five growls, leaning in closer. In your peripheries, you see the shocked faces of Allison and Luther. “No ordinary person could have caught that tennis ball—you had to have known it was coming.”

“Five, I seriously don’t know what you’re tal—”

Five holds his finger up. “And how do you explain tackling me away from the path of an incoming bullet seconds before it was even shot?”

“Bullet? Five, what the hell is going on?” Luther interjects from across the table. Five doesn’t take his eyes off of yours, staring into you as if the rest of the world doesn’t matter. You glance away for a moment to cast your gaze across the confused expressions of Luther and Allison, unable to take the heat.

Five doesn’t say anything more, but even in his silence, you can tell his expecting an answer. His consciousness weighs on you heavily enough to cast away your doubts and walls and make you crumble before his eyes. “Fine,” you relent. “I’m no ordinary person. But then none of you are either.”

“Wait a minute,” Allison murmurs from the sidelines. “Then you…?”

You hear her question before she can speak it. “Yes, I too was born on October 1st, 1997, just like the rest of you.”

“I knew it,” Five echoes, this time louder and more confident. “You never struck me as an ordinary person.”

Both you and Allison give Five a strange look, but Luther keeps his eyes trained on you.

“And how do we know you aren’t lying to us?” Luther queries.

You round on him. “Why would I want to be born on the same day as any of you?” You blurt out, anger coursing through your veins. You immediately recognize you’ve said something wrong.

Allison puts her hands on her hips. “What exactly is that supposed to mean?”

You try to bite down on your tongue to stop yourself from saying anything more, but it evades your control and words come spilling from your mouth before you can staunch the flow. “You guys got basically kidnapped from your families just to be raised as the bite-sized experiments of a man who I know never appreciated you for anything other than his specimens. Hell, Five doesn’t even have a name!”

A shocked silence sizzles through the room. Grace’s humming slices through the tense air. You glance about wildly, realize the true scope of your words, and curl in on yourself.

“I’m sorry,” you mutter, rising from your chair even despite having never received your eggs from Grace. “I overstepped my bounds. I should have never come here.”

You bump into your chair in your scramble to escape the kitchen and knock it over, sending it clattering to the pristine tile floor. Your shoes echo against the ground as you avoid the tight bubble of pressure that settled over the household, and although pressing against that threshold is freeing, you feel a heavy sadness weigh on your heart. You didn’t mean to be rude or crass or downright mean—your hatred for the Umbrella Academy was merely a defense mechanism taught to you from an early age. Your mother fed the stories to you in your childhood, and you grew up a staunch opponent of the organization, knowing such an environment would only apply a tourniquet to your flow of creativity rather than encourage it. You have become a real, normal person because of your avoidance of the academy and you don’t plan to ruin your streak now. You knew you never belonged here ever since you woke up in that strange white bed, and although you could never place a source to the nagging fear, you know now that you could have never fit in anyways.

Your mind made up, you return to your diminutive, stodgy guest-room with the intent to retrieve your meager belongings and return home to the only woman who has been with you through thick and thin—your mother.

——

Your room is empty and the longer you stay in it, the more you appreciate that fact. The Umbrella Academy is a complicated minefield of mental and physical warfare, and it is comforting to return to a place you can count on to be somewhat routine. Even then, however, it does not stay empty for long.

Just as you have finished making the bed out of common courtesy, the weighty chestnut door swings open with an ancient croak and you glance up to find Five standing in the archway.

“I’ve been thinking about what you said,” Five admits, his face stony.

You stare at him for a few moments. “...What?”

“About me not being able to accept help.”

“...What about it?”

“I was being petulant about it and realized it would be wiser of me to act like a grown man in a young adult’s body rather than act like a child in a young adult’s body.”

You turn away from him for a second to dust off your clothes. “What are you getting at?”

Five steps further into the room with a substantial step on the creaking floorboards and demands your attention. You dutifully give your eyes to him, and on closer inspection, you can see Five’s walls being torn down in the way he sets his wide jaws and leers through his green eyes.

“I may need your help,” Five admits finally, very quietly, as if afraid any of his siblings might hear.

You smile against your own will. “With saving the world?”

“Yes.”

You’re about to say no, just to see his face fall and get satisfaction from revenge after all the heartache he has put you through, but you figure he’s going through enough, what with the dismantling of his pride in the process of asking you for help.

“Then how could I say no?” you respond, and Five flashes you that rare smile. He opens his mouth, about to say something, but you quickly cut him off. “But before we do anything, can I ask something.”

Five pauses and weighs your request in his mind then crosses his arms and nods to you to signal the beginning of your question.

“What made you change your mind?” you ask. “On letting me help you?”

He furrows his thick brows for a moment, and briefly combs his fingers through his impeccable black hair. You see cogs whirring in his eyes, and he glances about the room briefly, as if searching for inspiration in his surroundings, before turning back to you and looking you in the eye.

“I figured it would be good to have someone useful outside of the family on my side.”

You stare at him for a few moments longer, expecting him to say more, but he says nothing else. You resist a sigh at his response, unsure why his perfectly reasonable answer leaves your hair standing on end and your soul searching for more, but you simply cannot dwell on it for much longer, or you will lose your mind. You wave away the strange thoughts with a brief flick of your hands, then turn to smile at Five.

“Then what’s our first mission, oh captain, my captain?”

Five motions you over with wave, smirking. “Follow me.”


End file.
